The Christmas exhibition is now available to view and purchase art online! So many wonderful Scottish artists have created postcard-size works especially for the event once again. And here are my little pieces joining the party! Browse and enjoy the exhibition.
Every year at about this time our little neighbourhood gathers to clear fallen leaves from the grass in our communal circle of trees. We wait until the leaves are almost completely down and get together on a Sunday afternoon to get busy filling compostable bags by the dozen for collection by the council and call it the 'annual leafathon'. It's a sure sign that autumn in almost over and we are at the gates of winter; today was the day. This is an illustration I made in 2019 in my Binky McKee capacity.
I actually missed the event for the first time in years. I woke up feeling poorly, but nonetheless I got dressed up in warm clothes and boots ready to go outside and help, but felt so rough B advised me not to. I acknowledged I wasn't up to it. Some kind of virus has been doing the rounds at work for about 2 weeks now, some people testing positive for covid, others with the same symptoms testing negative; I guess I had caught whatever it was, as I have had a head cold or something all week (I took two covid tests which showed negative). It's possible I was washed out and really tired. I just stood like a rather sad figure at the window watching B out there with the neighbours, all being very jolly and covered in leaves. A sort of bonkers astrology suggested itself to me in this fourth work I entered for the Christmas On a Small Scale exhibition. The basic materials are exactly the same as the three other drawings, the first layer being of a monoprint drawing in sepia and indigo inks using some of my Dad's old architectural forms then working back into it in mapping pens.
I do enjoy working at 210 x 150mm. I used to think it was A5, 210 x 148.5mm, which is a conventional sketch-book size, but soon discovered that the extra 1.5mm of the boards supplied by the Open Eye Gallery looked wrong with an A5 drawing mounted on them. The beauty of small scale work is that tiny elements make a huge difference, which is great for my kind of mark-making; the merest stroke of the pen, the texture of a line, each grainy smudge, and the paper itself assume a significance which is often lost in a larger work. This year I worked on paper sheets cut just slightly larger than the gallery boards, keeping them in a zipped folder acting as a drawing-board as well as safe transport for working on the move. Once the boards had arrived from the gallery I drew around them in pencil and carefully trimmed the drawings to the right size, which worked perfectly, in spite of my fears of cutting into the mount board and making wonky, torn edges. I thought it would be a good idea to work this way in future instead of using sketch-pads; I can dip in and out of drawings on interesting papers, and amass a collection of drawings all the same size. By next year, if I am invited to submit work to On a Small Scale again, I should have a good selection to choose from (just remember to buy some nice new sharp scalpel blades for trimming!) Ships That Sail is the third work submitted to On a Small Scale Christmas exhibition at the Open Eye Gallery in Edinburgh. Watercolours make their way into this drawing which is some way between map and diagram combining weather events, plus a large compass-like star, sails and navigation; again making use of my Dad's naval architectural templates (no idea how they should be properly used!)
On a Small Scale exhibition will be available to view and purchase exclusively online on the Open Eye Gallery's website from Saturday 25th November. All works in the exhibition are 15 x 21cm, either portrait or landscape format. |
Welcome to my work journal - a weekly update on drawings, work in progress, doodles and day-dreaming.
I changed the website address a few months ago, so some older links on previous posts are broken. If you click one of those and it takes you to a strange page, simply replace the .co.uk after the heatherelizawalker. with weebly.com and it will work again. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
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As well as the work you see here, I illustrate under the name of Binky McKee (my mother's maiden name was McKee, Binky was every single one of my great grandmother's many cats!)
If you would like to visit my Binky website, please click the picture above. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Dissolving PeopleA symbol on the footpath outside a local primary school gradually disappearing as the image breaks up and wears away until eventually it is obliterated by leaves and barely discernible. Photographed at intervals of several months between February 2021 and November 2022, oldest at the top.
(My shoes look so new in the first pic, and note the transition to new phone in the last photo). <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
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April 2024
(Sorry the archives don't nest!)
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A 2013 work book, still very much in use Please note all images on this website are ©Heather Eliza Walker 2013 - 2020, and may not be used or reproduced without prior consent. |